Thursday, December 3, 2015

Chief Investigator, Dr Andy Hogg, from the ANU hub of ARC Centre of
Excellence for Climate System Science worked with the National
Computational Infrastructure’s VizLab team, using a high-resolution
ocean model, to produce the animation. The visualization has
revealed underwater ocean storms generated by eddies, waterfalls of cold
dense water that plummet two kilometres off the Antarctic Continental
Shelf into the abyss and underwater waves hundreds of metres high.

Deep in the Southern Ocean lies the densest and coldest water on the planet. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t moving.
On the contrary, a vividly detailed animation of deep ocean currents, created
by Australian scientists with the help of their country’s most powerful
supercomputer, reveals a deep-sea world that’s full of dynamic
activity.
It shows underwater ocean storms generated by eddies,
waterfalls of cold dense water that plummet off the Antarctic
Continental Shelf into the abyss and underwater waves more than a mile
high.NEWS: Map of Ocean Currents Created from Space

"Scientists who have seen the visualization have been
astonished at the level of detail,” Andy Hogg, an associate professor
and ARC Future Fellow at Australian National University, said in a release.
Hogg is also a member of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.
The animation required so much data that it took seven hours to process a single second of the finished product.

But the animation is more than just a bunch of pretty pictures.
“Being able to actually see how the bottom water moves in three
dimensions rather than just looking at numerical, two-dimensional
outputs has already opened new areas for scientific research,” Hogg
said.
By peeling away the surface layer of water, the animation shows
how the cold, dense water produced off the Antarctic coastline spreads
out into the rest of the world’s ocean basins.
The water’s extreme
density and coldness drive many important currents in the ocean basins
connected to the Southern Ocean.

The water movement also helps the planet to cope with global
warming driven by human burning of fossil fuels.
As water near the
surface is drawn deep, it takes with it heat and carbon that otherwise
would have been returned to the atmosphere.
”The inhospitable climate of Antarctica and the lack of
sustained observations of the ocean in this region over a significant
period of time adds to the importance of using ocean models to create
visualizations like these,” Hogg explained.
From Hogg’s web page, here’s a more detailed explanation of Southern Ocean circulation.